


Long & Lost

by ScaryScarecrows



Series: Gaslights [10]
Category: Batman: Gotham by Gaslight (2018)
Genre: Gen, Ghostly Observances, Hurt No Comfort, I'm not kidding this isn't fixing anything, technically he's already dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-28 18:58:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14455683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScaryScarecrows/pseuds/ScaryScarecrows
Summary: Jason knows he's dead.





	Long & Lost

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Florence + the Machine song. Jason won’t remember any of this later, but I wanted to explore the idea a little bit anyway.

Jason knows he’s dead.

It’s hard not to know, when looking down at himself reveals gashes and cuts and a hole that goes straight through his body.

But nothing hurts. Nothing hurts anymore, and that’s…it’s something.

He doesn’t know why he’s here. He doesn’t know if maybe he did somethin’ to get him banned from Heaven but not so bad as to park him in Hell, or if…if maybe this is just what happens.

He gets sucked from person to person, seems like, whenever they…he’s not sure, really. Strong levels of missing him, maybe?

Lotta the time it’s Dick, who’s refusing to take care of himself hardly ever. He and Bruce don’t talk, now-they avoid each other and when they can’t, they start screaming at each other about anything and everything. Jason tries to stay away from them when that happens, but he can’t always.

“C’mon, it’s not…please…”

But they never hear him and always, in the end, Alfred makes them separate. Like now-Bruce is brooding somewhere and Dick’s slumped in Jason’s old room, clutching his hat to his face and trying so hard not to cry that his face is bright red.

“Dick?” He can’t touch him, he never can, but he tries anyway, tries to put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. He goes straight through him. “S’not your fault, Dickie, please…”

Dick eventually breaks down completely, sobbing near-silently into the cap, fingers white-knuckled against the fabric. Jason sighs (can he sigh if he doesn’t breathe?) and sits down next to him, hand just shy of his wrist.

“I miss you, too, Dick.”

* * *

Tim doesn’t know what sleep is.

He’s never known what sleep is, but now he’s living on green tea. Jason knows why-the few times he’s slept, he’s woken up screaming.

Like now. Nobody’s come, because it was so short, but he’s sweaty and gasping and staring at the ceiling like it holds the answers to life’s mysteries.

“It didn’t hurt, y’know,” he says, which is a blatant lie, but what the hell-Tim can’t hear him anyway and there does come a time that it’s better to reassure your baby brother rather than traumatize him further. “It was over quick enough.”

Another lie. He’d lingered for hours before Dick finally found him, struggling to breathe and unsure which would be better-him being alive when they finally found him (because they would, he’d known that from the start), and getting one last goodbye in, or him not having to see their reactions.

He’s still not sure which would have been easier.

Tim rolls over, curling around his pillow, and Jason tries to will himself solid enough to ruffle his hair.

He can’t.

He can, however, hover over the edge of the bed until Tim’s breathing evens back out.

“M’okay now, Timmy.” Who knows, maybe he can hear him in that half-asleep stage, like all the books imply. “Really. M’okay.”

If Tim hears anything, he doesn’t show it and Jason shuts up.

* * *

Bruce is hard to handle. He’s always been…intense…but now the fury and sorrow radiating off him is almost too much to take, like the blistering heat of an out-of-control blaze.

He doesn’t leave the cave, hardly. Just sits down there and works on his cases and the second night falls he’s out into the city, pummeling criminals to a pulp. There’s more than one time that Jason’s convinced he’s going to get himself killed.

“B, you gotta calm down,” he pleads, voice barely audible to himself over the screams of the man hanging off the building. “I don’t think you can bring me back this way.”

Or **any** way, and Bruce…has looked.

Bruce, like everyone else, pays him no mind. He merely pulls the schmuck up, pauses, and drops him again like he’s a human bandalore.*

“Bruce, c’mon.” He swipes for the line and goes through it. Always. Always through. When will he learn? “You’re gonna kill somebody. You’re gonna kill yourself!”

And he suspects that’s…at least partly the goal. More so now than ever-a few weeks ago he took a knife to the side and Jason will swear on his own grave that he **saw** him. He was looking in his direction, anyway, and he said his name.

And then he up and passed out and had to be collected. Barring his…his death, Jason has never felt more helpless than he did watch Bruce bleeding onto the cobblestones that night.

“Bruce?”

The schmuck is deposited on the roof and Bruce leaves, grappling off somewhere to make use of the information given. Jason follows.

What else can he do?

* * *

Selina doesn’t talk to Bruce, either, not more than she can help, but they don’t scream. They snip. They make icy, snide remarks like a couple arguing in public.

She doesn’t go in his room. She goes into the library where they used to read together, and sometimes she’ll pull out the book of poems they both enjoyed.

But she never opens it. She holds it, palm pressed flat against the cover, and sometimes she’ll pull it to her chest, but she never opens it. Not anymore.

There’s a bookmark there, on _Little Boy Blue**_ of all poems (and yeah, he’ll admit to having cringed when he remembered that) and he wonders if that’s why she doesn’t open the book.

“You could just skip over,” he suggests, in the wee hours of a rainy morning. She came down here at midnight, wrapped in her dressing-gown and hair loose, not a pin to be seen. Her eyes are hollow and she doesn’t have the grace she’s always had before. “If you wanted to go on, I don’t mind.”

She fingers the ribbon sticking out of the pages, emerald green (used to be his mom’s favorite hair ribbon, did he ever say?) and watches the rain strike against the glass.

It’s cold in here. Or at least, he thinks it is. He can never tell. It must be, though, because she pulls her robe tighter around herself before she sits down, fingers moving like they might finally open the book.

But she doesn’t. She brushes them along the pages before suddenly doubling over with a choked, “Oh, God, Jason-” and starting to cry, tears hitting the cover.

He sits down and tries to rest his head against her knees.

Tries and fails.

* * *

Alfred doesn’t have the reputation of being a stoic for nothing. He carries on, like he’s always done, mediating arguments and stitching people back together and not saying much of anything.

But he doesn’t sleep, either. He remains in the kitchen with a cup of lavender tea, hands folded around the mug and tired eyes fixed on the chair that Jason used to favor.

He looks old. It’s like his wrinkles multiplied overnight.

“Alfie?” Sometimes he thinks Alfred might know he’s there. He doesn’t want to think about why that might be. Maybe he’s just more open-minded or something. “You gotta sleep too, y’know.”

Alfred takes a sip of his tea. Jason chooses to see this as an ‘I’m listening’ and soldiers on.

“If you’re gonna insist on takin’ care of everyone, you gotta get a full eight hours or whatever. F’you go, they all go.”

Alfred finishes his tea, washes the cup, and goes upstairs without a word.

He knows it’s coincidence, but he’s still gonna count that as a victory.

* * *

With Dove, it’s never outward. He guesses it can’t be, really-you can’t afford that sort of emotional rawness when you work for a crime lord. But it’s there, if you know where to look. Like now.

“-do your goddamn job! That’s what you’re paid for, so get it done!”

They guy she’s yelling at looks paler than he does and Jason can’t blame him. Dove’s the **nice** one, even when Penguin’s away and she’s in charge of keepin’ everyone in line.

“I think you scared him,” he says as the man scrambles away. She pinches her nose and walks back to the cab, melts into the seat by the window. He sprawls across the other seat, since she can’t see him to yell at him to sit up and hey, he’s already dead, nothing can hurt him anymore.

He never thought he’d want to be yelled at, but he does. Just one more time.

“I wanna come home,” he whispers, curling up and accidentally jabbing a crooked finger into the hole in his chest. “I wanna come home, _Maman._ ”***

Dove doesn’t answer. She’s not even looking over-she’s looking out the window, fingers trembling around the handle of her umbrella. He’s never seen her look this tired.

He closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to and finds out, a few minutes later, that dead boys can, in fact, cry.

THE END

 

 

 

*Yo-yo.

**Poem by Eugene Fields about the death of a child.

***‘Mom’-Jason’s using it as a term of endearment, kinda like how some people call a friend’s mom ‘Ma Firstname’ (or whatever).


End file.
